Presidio announced that the company has completed its previously announced acquisition of INX. In accordance with the terms of the definitive agreement, which was announced on November 1, 2011, Presidio has acquired all outstanding common stock of INX. Going forward, INX will operate as a subsidiary of Presidio Networked Solutions, Inc., and will no longer be a publicly traded stock on the NASDAQ exchange. Presidio is owned by American Securities and management.

Minnesota Public Radio|American Public Media has announcedthe selection of VISI as its new managed hosting and data centre provider.  Brad Rosenberger, manager of IT Infrastructure at Minnesota Public Radio, said, “We needed a hosting provider with a top tier facility in the Twin Cities to ensure the best availability for our web and IT services. Now, more than ever, our listeners rely on MPR for our in-depth online reporting, in addition to our radio broadcasts.”

The stock exchange NYSE Euronext is looking to broaden its horizons by offering up some of the capacity in its Mahwah, New Jersey data centre as colocation space.

Virogen, a holding company specializing in data security and encryption technology, has announced that the company's wholly-owned subsidiary Tiger Team Technologies "T3," is engaged in substantive discussions to acquire a company operating four data centers in the southeast region of the United States.  T3's acquisition target presently has a client base upwards of 10,000 to which the company would market its enterprise data tracking and protection solutions upon finalization of the acquisition.

zColo, a Zayo Group company, has announced it has acquired MarquisNet's data-centre business in Las Vegas, Nevada. The 28,000 sq ft data centre, located at 7185 Pollock Drive, will be the twelfth zColo Colocation facility.

The acquisition represents Zayo Group's 18th acquisition since its inception. The acquisition is part of Zayo's strategy to grow its Bandwidth Infrastructure business through investments in organic growth as well as acquisitions.

Business Continuity Solutions, a nationwide leader in the provision of backup and disaster recovery solutions for corporations throughout the US, has announced a contract to provide its disaster recovery solution to the Stanley, North Carolina manufacturing facility of the Deb Group.

Silicon Valley Bank, which caters to the venture capital community, announced today that it is expanding in Arizona and expects to add up to 220 jobs over the next three years. The Santa Clara-based financial services company is opening a new information technology and operations centre soon in Tempe and plan to hire 40 to 50 people over the next year.

The location won't be announced until a lease is signed. The company has had a small operation since 1997, and now has three employees. They will consolidate the offices this summer.

Much has been written about the U.S. government’s plan to shutter 1,200 data centres. There’s been considerably less chatter about the fact that some of the remaining revamped federal data centres are now leasing out excess capacity to other government agencies. That strategy of going big and selling off extra capacity is right out of the Amazon playbook. Amazon data

Data centre holdings group Fortress International Group has announced it has appointed Anthony Angelini its new CEO and a member of its board of directors. Angelini replaces Thomas P. Rosato, who will remain with the company as non-executive chairman of FTIG's board of directors.

John Morton, Fortress' outgoing chairman, will serve as an advisor to the board through the first quarter of 2012 to assist with the transition.

Source: The WHIR

Leading Technology and Systems Integrator MicroTech has been selected as one of only four awardees of the Army Private Cloud  Mobile Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity contract for the Program Executive Office, Enterprise Information Systems . The US$250 million Army Private Cloud contract will allow the Army to reduce costs through server consolidation and updating and optimizing IT with fixed and containerized data centres. This is the Army's first cloud computing contract.

Carter Validus Mission Critical REIT has announced that it acquired a US$94.75 million, multi-tenant, wholesale data centre located in Atlanta, Georgia. The acquisition was completed through a joint venture between CV REIT and three institutional investors. As general partner and manager of the joint venture, CV REIT will control and run the operations of the property. The property, Peachtree Data Center, is a wholesale multi-tenant data centre facility for carriers and colocation providers.

Schneider Electric, a global specialist in energy management, has announced it has been selected for installation of an US$11.2 million energy savings performance contracting project for the Virginia Department of Military Affairs. Through a series of energy conservation measures, Schneider Electric is implementing much needed energy-efficient facilities upgrades and improving the operating environment for soldiers and staff working in the buildings.

Infoblox, a maker of automated network control systems for data centres, has said that it would seek to raise as much as US$125 million in an initial public offering of stock.

The Santa Clara, California-based company says its systems enable companies to better utilize so-called cloud computing functions and virtual desktops, which both rely on powerful back-end servers. Its systems have been sold to more than 5,000 businesses and organizations including Adobe, Barclays, Best Buy, Boeing, IBM, Reuters and Staples..

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has awarded SAIC. a blanket purchase agreement to provide life-cycle information technology services to the Health Resources and Services Administration. The agreement has one base year and four one-year options. SAIC said its services will help develop and maintain data-focused systems for the HRSA’s bureau reporting system.

ePlus has announced that its subsidiary, ePlus Technology, acquired the operating business of VantiCore, a Cisco-focused solutions provider headquartered in New Hampshire. With expertise in advanced unified communications, collaboration, and customer contact centre solutions, ePlus gains increased market presence in New England as well as enhanced Cisco engineering delivery capabilities to complement its existing UC, data centre, and managed services practices. Details of the transaction are not being disclosed.

Rackspace US, a subsidiary of Rackspace Hosting, has entered into an agreement to lease data centre space near Dallas.

Online Tech has announced that it has completed a new fibre optic build-out between their Ann Arbor (pictured) and Mid-Michigan data centres. The new fibre build also provides a higher speed connection between data centres and additional connectivity to four carriers including Savvis, Level 3, Global Crossing and Cogent.

QTS (Quality Technology Services), one of the nation's largest and fastest-growing providers of data centre facilities and managed services, has announced that private cloud provider eApps is expanding its presence into the QTS Richmond Data Center (pictured). eApps has been hosting its cloud computing customers in QTS' Suwanee Data Center, expanding its footprint in that facility three times in 2011.

Knology has announced that it has acquired E Solutions Corporation for US$13.8 million in cash. E Solutions is a premiere provider of colocation and data centre services, operating two state-of-the-art SAS 70 Type II certified data centres in Tampa, Florida.

ECSI, a leading end-to-end solutions provider for over 1,300 colleges and universities, announced the successful relocation of its data centre with Expedient, Pittsburgh's largest hosting provider. The relocation will allow ECSI to improve technology infrastructure and maximize the experience and uptime for its users, their students and borrowers.

Colo5 is expanding its data centre at its Jacksonville headquarters. 

The independent data centre operator said the expansion will add 6,000 sq ft of raised floor, with 200 watts of power per sq ft, to the 15,000-sq ft facility at 4800 Spring Park Road. 

Source: Jacksonville Business Journal 

Here for full article

The US Navy expects to save US$1.4 billion from data centre consolidation by 2017. That's the goal of Navy Chief Information Officer Terry Halvorsen who has said the Navy and Marine Corps need to cut back on the number of data centres they operate in order to cut their overall information technology budgets by 25%.

The Navy and Marines operate 150 data centres and the goal is to shut down and consolidate as many as possible by 2017 to meet the savings goals, Halvorsen's blog post said. 

Source: Next Gov

Involta, a Cedar Rapids, Iowa based provider of high availability colocation enterprise data centres, has announced that it has acquired the assets of SolutionPro, a data centre and managed services provider located in Boise, Idaho.

The Huawei-TELUS Innovation Centre for Enterprise Cloud Services has opened at Carleton University. The centre was created through a C$1.4 million investment made by Huawei and TELUS.

Rio Tinto and CGI Group, a leading provider of information technology and business process services, have announced the renewal and expansion of their outsourcing contract. The three-year contract extension is valued at approximately US$60 million.

Gov. Matt Mead’s plan to double the amount of money to recruit data centres and other high-tech companies to the state prompted a slew of questions from legislators late last week. In his budget proposal to the 2012 Legislature, Mead seeks to add US $15 million to the US$15 million already in the governor’s budget, which was designed to attract large data centres to the state, such as Verizon. 

VerityThree, a technology consulting and management services company, has named Erik Gustafson as its new chief technology officer and has opened a new office in Dallas, Texas. The move comes as several large managed services providers attempt to blanket the IT services market in Texas.

The federal government has moved forward with a project that will add 200 jobs nearby in Urbana when the project is complete in 2015. The U.S. General Services Administration awarded a US$191.5 million contract to design and build the Social Security Administration's new national data facility.

Hensel Phelps Construction Co., based in Chantilly, Virgina, won the contract. The project involves a 300,000 sq ft facility, said Laurie Boyer, the executive director of the Frederick County Office of Economic Development.

US online clothing retailer Zappos has warned its 24 million customers that personal data including their phone numbers and home addresses may have been stolen in a recent cyber-attack. "We were recently the victim of a cyber-attack by a criminal whogained access to parts of our internal network and systems through one of our servers in Kentucky," CEO Tony Hseih wrote in an email to employees. 

Prolime Host, a leading provider of enterprise web hosting solutions and services for global businesses, has recently launched an extensive range of data servers at their new state of the art data centre in Phoenix, Arizona.

Internap Network Services, a provider of intelligent IT Infrastructure services, has announced that it has successfully completed the transition from SAS 70 to a Service Organization Controls (SOC) Report, regarding the operations and control structure in its company-controlled data centres. Internap is one of the first known data centre providers to receive a report under the new SOC2 Type II standard for controls at a service organisation.

Social media giant Facebook says it will push the Oregon legislature to fix its tax classification. The company says it was surprised to learn it was labelled as a utility company. They fear this could impose a steep tax bill on their new data centre in Prineville.

A spokesman for Governor Kitzhaber says the governor is working on a fix for Facebook and the company should wait for next year before going to legislature.

Source: KDTV

Here for full article

Harbor Ridge Capital, an M&A advisory group focused on lower middle market technology companies, has announced it has completed a capital raise for BurstNET Technologies, which was funded by an undisclosed institutional investor 

ElasticHosts, the cloud server provider, has announced its launch into North America. The company will open two new data centre locations in Los Angeles, USA and Toronto, Canada, adding to its existing locations in London, UK and San Antonio, Texas. With a central, east and west coast presence sitting alongside London, ElasticHosts will now be able to provide its elastic, easy-to-use, pay-as-you-go cloud hosting to customers across North America.

RagingWire Data Centers, the nation's premier data centre provider, has announced that its second Sacramento, California, data centre has been awarded LEED Gold certification by the US Green Building Council. LEED is the primary standard for the design, construction, and operation of environmentally friendly data centres.

F5 Networks reported profit and revenue ahead of expectations in its December quarter and raised guidance for its current March quarter. F5 Networks, whose network controllers are widely used in data centres to speed up application servers, said it earned US$1.03 per share in its first quarter ended Dec. 31, up 17% from 88 cents in the year-earlier period. Revenue rose 19.9% to US$322.4 million. 

BATS Global Markets, a global operator of stock and options markets, and Savvis, a CenturyLink company and an outsourcing provider of managed computing and network infrastructure for IT applications, has announced that BATS will use Savvis' Chicago CH4 data centre as its secondary data centre facility for all three of its U.S. markets. 

zColo has announced it is opening a facility in downtown Chicago, located at 600 South Federal St to deliver colocation and interconnection services. This will be zColo's first location in downtown Chicago and 13th facility in the U.S. The carrier neutral colocation space will offer 8,500 sellable sq ft and support up to 200 watts per sq ft for high-power density applications. Services are anticipated to be available by the end of Q2 2012.

Google has received ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 environmental and workplace safety certifications for all of its U.S. data centres, the company has announced. 

Joe Kava, Google's senior director of data centre construction and operations, said in a blog post that Google is the first major Internet company to earn these designations. Google has six data centres in the states, located in Oregon, Iowa, Oklahoma, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.

Source: PC Mag

PCCW Global, an operating division of HKT, Hong Kong’s premier telecommunications service provider, and IFX Networks, a regional network service provider with an extensive Ethernet platform in South America, have interconnected their Ethernet networks to enhance service offerings in the Latin American market.

The Web site and office tools of online services company Zoho were knocked offline Friday by a power outage in its data centre. All of Zoho's services went down at 11:25 a.m. ET Friday. Making regular status updates on Twitter, the company reported at 11:46 a.m. that it was being affected by a power failure in the Equinix colocation provider.  The power failure, according to Zoho, was affecting its data centre.

Omaha-based CoSentry is investing roughlyUS$30 million to build and outfit a 60,000-sq ft data centre in Lenexa. The centre also will have call centre and technical help desk space to support the company’s managed services, colocation and cloud computing offerings. In all, it is expected to bring 60 new jobs to the area.

Savvis, a CenturyLink company has announced the availability of a range of low latency connectivity options for trading firms requiring access to interest rate swap futures transacted on Eris Exchange, the leading, open access futures exchange for interest rate risk management, offering forward starting and spot starting interest rate swap futures contracts cleared by CME Clearing.

National Bank of Canada and CGI Group have signed a five-year information services contract valued at US$350 million. For 11 years, CGI has provided National Bank with application development and support services. Under the terms of the new contract, National Bank will continue to benefit from the expertise of CGI and its professionals in maintaining and developing its banking information systems.

Joyent has netted US$85 million in new venture funding to fuel a global expansion of its cloud services. Most of the new money comes from Weather Invest II Group and Accelero Capital but Telefonica Digital is also investing. Existing Joyent backers include Intel Capital, Epic Ventures, Liberty Global, Greycroft Partners and El Dorado Ventures.

Russo Development has gained approval to build its ninth data centre development in the New York metropolitan area. The Greenfield site is located on 71 acres near Exit 12 off I-287. The site has infrastructure improvements including direct access to multi-sourced 69kV sub transmission electrical service from PSE&G and direct connection to two sources of water.

IceWEB, a leading provider of Unified Data Storage appliances for cloud and virtual storage networks, has announced that it has received a significant order from the United States Geological Survey for multiple IceWEB 6000 unified data storage appliances. 

Banco Supervielle has implemented a new to help it take a next step: virtualization. This project is part of the bank's strategy to consolidate its business in a single corporate building that houses the data centre and a unified network.

The data centre facilitates operations and helps enable mission-critical information to be administered within the bank, maximizing resources and providing agility to the business while its customers can access their accounts and financial services anytime and anywhere

Source: 4 Traders

Niobrara Energy Park, located in Weld County, Colorado, is a renewable energy datacenter project that will combine clean fossil fuels, alternative energy, Smart Grid, energy storage, renewable energy research, DC power and cloud computing data centers.

“Niobrara Energy Park is the largest proposed MicroGrid on the planet,” said said Craig Harrison, founder of the data center project.

The General Services Administration has awarded CGI Group a US$20.76 million contract to move some of its websites, including USA.gov and Data.gov, to a public cloud infrastructure. The agency's Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies is overseeing the five-year contract, which was awarded as part of the GSA's Infrastructure as a Service offerings, introduced last July to enable agencies to choose from a menu of cloud computing services via the GSA's Apps.gov website.

CQG, the industry-leading order execution, charting, and analytics provider for global, electronically-traded securities, has  announced that it has colocated its exchange gateway servers at CME Group's new, state-of-the-art data centre located in Aurora, Illinois to provide low-latency order routing and market data
connectivity to the CME Globex platform. 

Telx has announced that Masergy has joined the Telx EtherConnect community in its Atlanta C3 Cloud Connection Center.

The global virtualized network services provider has selected Telx's premier colocation services in Telx's strategically-locatedAtlanta C3 data centre to enhance the availability of its Intelligent Transport service, delivering flexible, convenient Ethernet business communications offerings to financial services, healthcare, hospitality and entertainment companies in the southeast region of the United States.

WAN Virtualization leader Talari Networks, has announced it has secured US$4.5 million in financing from current backers including Menlo Ventures, Silver Creek Ventures and private investors. Mr. H. Dubose Montgomery, founder and managing director of Menlo Ventures, will join Talari Networks’ board of directors.

Equinix, a provider of global data centre services, has announced that Reality Check Network, a provider of managed hosting services, will continue to leverage its presence within the Equinix International Business Exchange data centres to deliver high-end managed hosting services including virtualization, storage, load balancing, VPN and CDN.

nlyte Software, the data centre infrastructure management solution provider, has achieved record growth for calendar year 2011 including: record revenue growth, significant customer acquisitions and on time delivery of new product releases.

 nlyte Software’s accomplishments for calendar Q4 of 2011 include: Signed a record number of new customers in a single quarter; Closed large single order for over US$2 million  and migrated a major insurance company from Emerson’s Aperture Vista product to the nlyte DCIM suite

Rubicon Professional Services, a leading national provider of full-service construction and energy management, consulting, engineering and data centre design for mission-critical facilities, has announced that its 2011 client base, and nationwide presence grew for the fifth consecutive year. The company's continued growth underscores the market's inexhaustible need to properly store and retrieve data vis-a-vis the construction of new, secure, energy-efficient data centres.

Virtualization savings are real – and are expected to grow – but government agencies need to overcome funding uncertainties and other significant barriers to achieve their virtualization goals, according to a study by MeriTalk underwritten by Microsoft and NetApp. The new report, “Virtualization Vacuum: The 2012 Government Virtualization Study,” explores the current and future state of play in government server and desktop virtualization initiatives, including key differences between Federal and state/local markets.